The Gender Equality Checkpoint

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Originally Posted by DanaC

Maybe I misunderstood your post Trace, but it did seem to be lumping women together as some kind of homogenous whole, entirely separated from the male of the species, who are invited to test and analyse 'women' in that scenario.

I can sort of see how there might be a notion that experiments/tests are something you do on other species, but I am not convinced that was ever the case... my preferred reading for awhile has been psychology where almost all studies are on groups of people, so I guess I don't quite have that association.
I wonder if you would have had the same association with an alternative response to the square/model poster - quoting a study where hetrosexual women and men where given images of the opposite gender and while different men gave more or less the same rating to women, women gave vastly different ratings to the various men (and then ranting on the implication). Would that have the same implication of treating genders as different species simply because it was accounted for and lumping them up together into statistics? Is the act of examining generalized differences an immediate taboo that must not be looked upon for the wraith of the amazon goddess will smite us all?

I suggested the experiment because having stumbled upon it accidentally by actually doing it. A friend's date for her behavior for things I thought reflect poorly on her as a person and then seen how gradually the women around the table started leaving with facial expresses varying between discomfort and disgust. I was curious and later tried it with several other groups, and each time it works, and I found it both fascinating and disturbing that it does.

Personally I have no doubt that if this was conducted on a large enough population there would be exceptions and it wouldn't be a 100%, and yet I have very little inclination to throw the baby out of the bathwater, or to deny it on the basis of ideological reasoning.